The events in Vradyevka—what little reaction the state managed to produce—came to nothing. Thirteen militsiya officers were dismissed. Retraining was conducted in some places, and (surprise!) an MVS reform was promised.
It is clear that dismissals and retraining serve only to pacify the public, but the MVS reform is another matter. That said, we have been promised this reform since the perestroika era. During this time, several presidents and countless governments have come and gone, but no one has ever started this reform. What is more, if earlier at least some projects circulated among experts, then after the Vradyevka events, nothing could be found except promises.
The progressive public traditionally hopes for a good government that will someday come and reform the police service properly. While waiting for the good tsar, the public discusses how the police are structured in different countries and calculates how well this or that structure would suit Ukraine. Honestly, the author of these lines does not believe in good government. Moreover, he is convinced that any reform will be “incomplete and half-hearted.” Therefore, I propose to think about a system in which we would not only forget the word “MVS,” but also stop worrying about all sorts of reforms, since the police would constantly reform itself. This system is called “the market”—everyone knows that the market is always in flux, always “reforming,” constantly trying to adapt to consumers. We will be discussing private police.
Actually, all the problems of police forces and other state services around the world boil down to a simple economic circumstance—one that has been a commonplace in economic theory since James Buchanan’s time. It is this: the agency providing law enforcement services is funded by the state, not by the consumer, as happens in an open market. In other words, you do not voluntarily purchase security the way you purchase other goods and services; you are forced to consume what is imposed on you from outside, and moreover, with your own money. An ordinary voluntary purchase gives the producer a signal about your preferences; in the case of state services, such signals do not exist.
As a result, the police of all countries of the world are engaged in producing reports. The production of security is rather a side effect of this activity. The answer to why our militsiya is so inferior to Western police forces, in a nutshell, is this: civil society—the practice of managing on one’s own without state superiors, and carefully watching those superiors where they act—is still developed in the West orders of magnitude higher than in Ukraine. And the fact that civil society cannot be “built” or “implemented” is precisely what inspires unshakeable confidence in the futility of any attempts at “reform”—attempts to touch up and patch the system without changing its essence.
Before moving on to a brief description of what private police might look like, I will dwell on one more important point. Today it is customary to consider that security and law enforcement is some kind of “public good,” which only a state monopoly is capable of producing. When they talk about the “evolution” thanks to which the state monopoly on the production of security allegedly arose, Britain is usually cited as an example, since it is no secret that in most other countries, the police arose not as a means of producing security, but as an institution of state coercion. The classics of the genre here are the French or Russian gendarmery. However, modern researchers, like Stephen Davies, tell us that in Britain, upon closer examination, everything was not so.
The British police came into being quite slowly. In 1829, the London Police Office was created, and only in 1856 did the law obligate the creation of local police forces funded by local taxes. All this time, reform continued, inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about the caring state.
How were the functions we are accustomed to considering police functions carried out? They were carried out by civil society. There was the position of parish constable, whose function included investigating crimes and arresting suspects. People were appointed to this position for a year and received no salary. Constables were, so to speak, the formal side of the matter; the main work was done by the citizens themselves.
The British legal system placed the burden of catching the criminal and proving his guilt squarely on the victim. Since this activity required money, and the subsequent trial required even more, honest citizens united in various associations, clubs, and similar organizations that functioned as a kind of insurance funds. If one of the members became a crime victim, these funds were used. There were many forms of such organizations. Another law enforcement institution was the reward—offered for investigation, capture of a criminal, or any information about a particular crime. By the time the state began to take interest in the activities of such insurance societies, according to some estimates, there were already about 4,000 of them. Some of them were literally private police, that is, they organized their own guards and patrols.
Well, what about our reformers? As it turns out, they were dealing with a completely different problem. Patrick Calhoun and Edwin Chadwick created the police not so much for law enforcement as for political purposes. It was believed that the growth of cities and “luxury” were the cause not only of crimes but also, in general, of moral decay and the resulting political activity of the “lower classes.” Therefore, the task of the police consisted of a kind of “moral surveillance” of the poor. It is noteworthy that the reformers blamed associations and clubs for catching criminals precisely for their lack of interest in solving this very problem, and this was one of the main arguments for creating a state police.
Then the following happened. The police were created and tried to do what the reformers prescribed. However, nobody likes it when someone comes to their house and starts teaching them how to live—even the “lower classes.” Therefore, after several incidents, including small anti-police riots, the police gradually abandoned its role of “moral surveillance” and engaged in what we are accustomed to considering its function today.
Private citizen activity in the production of security gradually faded away due to a simple economic reason—nobody wants to pay twice. If the police, paid from taxes, is engaging in law enforcement and catching criminals, voluntary societies created for these same purposes have little chance of survival. Of course, subsequently, the state insured itself against people getting the idea to take care of law enforcement themselves by creating and refining “criminal procedure” and forcibly monopolizing all its stages. In any case, British history tells us that the local police, like all others, was not created specifically for the purpose of producing security. It also tells us that civil society is quite capable of managing here without the state. Thus, the now-common opinion that only a monopolistic state structure can produce security is an ordinary myth.
What is “private police” and what should it look like? Actually, this is a question from the series “what will private bread production look like”? If you have a state monopoly on bread production in your country and there are talks about its privatization, then it is clear that asking what this production will look like after it is somewhat naive, since the correct answer is “I don’t know.” We see formal institutions and are able, as it seems to us, to describe them (although in reality they are based on informal institutions that cannot be described precisely, but that is another problem), and we demand such a description for a market situation. However, the market is distinguished precisely by the fact that the same service can be produced and delivered by many means, and that producers constantly compete in finding these means in order to get the consumer’s money. Therefore, any reasoning about “how it will be” is fantasy to one degree or another.
In reasoning about the future, one can only start from current practice. Today, it can be divided into enforcement of rules established by the owner, investigation, and, properly speaking, coercive activity.
“Enforcement of rules established by the owner” means protection of property, patrolling, and enforcement of the owner’s rules. Some of these functions are already performed today by private security firms. The most natural and simple way to implement this function is armed citizens who protect themselves and their property. This also includes voluntary patrols or patrols hired by private individuals, associations of private individuals, homeowners’ associations, some block or district voluntary associations for the purpose of “maintaining order on the streets.” A regular bouncer at a club or restaurant is also “enforcement of rules established by the owner.”
The most important thing here is to understand that the employer (owner or representative of a group of owners) establishes the rules that the private police are tasked with enforcing. For example, residents of a certain street may decide that someone who littered on their street should pay a fine of a hundred thousand dollars. And the police they hired would have to monitor this. Residents of the neighboring street may set a fine of ten dollars. And the same security firm could monitor this.
There is nothing strange or surprising in this state of affairs; we have always lived in such a world. The ability to establish rules and try to obligate or compel others to follow them is the foremost attribute of an owner. It is simply that, in most cases, in our current life, the actual owner of anything you touch is the state, and we all should really look at things as they are—at best, we are only long-term tenants.
The other two points are much simpler. Private investigation surprises no one. Sherlock Holmes was engaged precisely in this. He obtained information, including evidence, and passed it to his client. And the client himself decided what to do next. As for “coercive activity,” by this the author means activity riskier than ordinary law enforcement, connected, for example, with capturing armed criminals or delivering defendants in crimes against property to court if they do not wish to appear there.
I think it is obvious to the reader that private police means serious changes to the entire legal system familiar to us, including court proceedings or, say, the concept of laws as orders issued by a specially elected group of people. In order to seriously discuss these transformations, one would need to address the principle of self-ownership, voluntary jurisdiction, reputational mechanisms for resolving disputes, deal with “externalities” and “free-rider effects,” and many other things. All of this is difficult to fit into the framework of a magazine article; my goal is only to point out that there exists a real alternative to endless “MVS reforms”—an alternative that would allow us to forget this problem forever, or rather, to make it the concern of those who receive money for this activity.
Therefore, in conclusion, I will dwell on several more points characterizing private police.
First of all, private police is not some result of privatizing the existing state police along with its functions. The word “private” means that anyone can engage in this activity. There is no benefit in privatizing the current militsiya and preserving its monopoly and powers. We would simply get a monopolist like the Fed or the NBU, which are formally private firms, but in essence are coercive monopolies. Generally speaking, it is difficult to imagine anything more terrible than a private district police station.
Secondly, the functions of private police are not assigned to it by default but are determined by contract with the owners or their organizations, and, as I already said, the same security firm can enforce different rules for different owners. I think it is unnecessary to explain that the “runaway printer” in such conditions is simply impossible. Members of parliament will have to think about how their laws will be enforced, but it would be better for them to immediately think about whether they are needed at all.
Thirdly, private police means the elimination of the territorial principle familiar to us. Having found myself once in the role of “victim,” the author of these lines saw the entire process of “providing security services and searching for criminals” with his own eyes. It can begin and end with a simple fact—the militsiya believes that the criminal lives in the same militsiya-administrative unit where he does his misdeeds. In order to get the workers of other militsiya-administrative units involved, you need to make considerable efforts and know how to work the administrative market (organize a “call from above,” for example). In general, nobody catches anyone; first of all, they will offer you to identify the scoundrel from the militsiya family album, and if you didn’t recognize anyone, then you had bad luck. At best, you will take back your statement; at worst, they will find some poor sap on whom to hang the case. I remind you, the function of militsiya is to produce reports, not to catch criminals. So, in a private police system, you can choose with whom and what contract to conclude, or not conclude any contract at all. Services, for example, could be provided by a firm with an office in New York, hiring outsourced patrols. Many security agencies with different specializations could work in one territory, and so on.
Fourthly, it is clear that in such a system, the simplest solution for the consumer is insurance. Just as today, to purchase internet, you conclude a contract with a provider, and he takes care of all the rest of the quite complex and tangled business, so in the production of security, insurance appears today as such a channel of final connection between the consumer and producers. You buy an insurance policy, and then it is the insurance company’s business how and with what security firms it will work in order to reduce for itself the risks of insured events occurring.
Fifthly, it is clear that a phenomenon like private police, by default, assumes that all kinds of legal intermediaries between victims and criminals are excluded. It is the victim’s business to bring charges, organize the investigation, and deliver the criminal to court. No intermediaries in the form of a “prosecutor’s office” can exist here. In fact, this means that criminal law, as such, becomes part of civil law; crimes exist against the owner, not against an abstract state. The right to “initiate criminal proceedings” remains only with the owner. Along with this inevitable transformation, a huge layer of today’s abuses disappears.
And finally, it is obvious that only private police in the sense I have tried to outline here makes completely impossible the practice from which we have long and confidently suffered. If the owner establishes the rules, then “victimless crimes” disappear. Drinking beer on your own plot? Drink. On mine—don’t drink, because I forbid it. Along with “victimless crimes,” most grounds for abuse and extortion disappear. “Economic crimes” disappear as a class. Nobody will jail a competitor or “take away” a business by siccing the “inspection agencies” on them. The only possible case of police intervention in economic relations is contract violations, and even then, only if such intervention is provided for by the contract itself. It becomes impossible to come to your house and conduct a search at the initiative of the “law enforcement agencies.” It becomes impossible to detain you on the street, bring you to the “station,” and keep you rotting in the “cage.” The reason is obvious—in this case, you will be calling not your “lawyer,” but your police. For armed people to intervene in your life, very serious accusations must exist, brought not by the state, not by the prosecutor’s office, but by the injured owner who believes that completely specific damage to his property was caused by you. Private police simply does not have any other work except catching real criminals—those who encroach on your life, health, and property.